Rome Enters the Hellenistic World

Tides of History

Wondery / Patrick Wyman

Documentary, Society & Culture, History

4.8 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 19 June 2025

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For most of its history, the Roman Republic had little to do with the Greek East. That changed at the end of the third century BC. As the war against Hannibal reached its conclusion, momentous things were happening in the eastern Mediterranean, as the system of great powers that had defined the Hellenistic world for a century collapsed almost overnight. Now, Rome would have to make a decision about what to do, and the consequences changed the political map for the next thousand years or more.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Wonderly Plus subscribers can listen to Tides of History early and ad-free right now.
0:04.6	Join Wonderly Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
0:21.0	The old man scratched at his bald spot. In point of fact, calling it a bald spot was more than a bit generous.
0:24.6	What had once been an exception to the rule of a hair-covered head was now the rule itself,
0:29.0	as all traces of hair follicles had long since disappeared into the mists of time.
0:33.7	Quintus Fulvius Flacus would have preferred a hat on a sunny day like this,
0:37.1	but one of Rome's Patres Conscripti, the venerable body of senators, simply couldn't be seen in some farmer's battered straw headgear.
0:45.1	There were Greeks about, and they had to be shown what proper Romans looked like.
0:49.3	The folds of his toga, a plain, unadorned white cloth, hung heavily around his stooped body. He remembered his
0:55.9	pride all those years ago, when he had first stood for election and worn the brilliant
1:00.3	white Toga Candida. It had been ten years since his last election, and he hadn't been a
1:04.9	youngster even then. Now, by his reckoning, he was nearly 80 years old. That made Quintus one of the oldest men left in the Senate, an esteemed ex-consul and
1:14.8	Prater, one of the few left who had fought in the first long war with Carthage.
1:19.2	Victor over the fearsome boy in his first consulship, master of horse to a dictator of
1:23.4	the Republic, conqueror of Capu in his second consulship, and now, at least in his opinion,
1:28.7	an elder statesman. Quintus lacked neither pride nor self-regard. The young pups had all gathered
1:34.8	over by the Rostra, the Speaker's platform in the forum, decorated with the prows of warships
1:39.6	taken in battle more than a century ago. He spat at the side of the youngsters, hawking a goblet of
1:44.8	phlegm under the worn paving stones. Fools, he thought, not a single one of them older than 50,
1:50.8	though he had to admit that young Publius Cornelius Scipio had assuaged some of his doubts for
1:55.2	this victory over Hannibal the past year, some of his doubts, but not all. The giggle of younger senators and officials were deep in
2:02.8	conversation. The news the Greek envoys brought from the East alarmed them. That much was obvious
	...

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